WD My Cloud EX4 8TB Personal Cloud Storage NAS Review

WD My Cloud EX4 Admin Panel

The My Cloud EX4 dashboard is super simple to use and has a user interface that is easy to learn and navigate. The home menu clearly shows the free capacity, drive status, firmware version, network activity, cloud devices, users and apps. Basically, all the basics are covered here.

The EX4 comes with a single account for the admin, but you can easily come into the users menu and add individual users and then even cluster select users together to form groups.

The WD My Cloud EX4 comes with public shared folders for pictures, videos and music. You can setup more shared folders and control access to each shared item. So, if a family wanted to share the My Cloud EX4 the parents can have a shared folder between themselves, but have it to where the other family members can access it.

If you want to be able to access your data from anywhere in the world through an internet connection you can do so with WD Cloud Access, but you must have it activated first. It should be noted that neither the WD My Cloud or My Cloud EX4 have the ability to sync folders via the cloud. This is a bit disappointing as if a group of people or a business is using the EX4 from computers, tablets and smartphones on a regular basis some updates might get missed.

The Western Digital My Cloud EX4 gives you multiple backup options and includes a 10 user license for WD Smartware Pro software. From this menu you can backup USB to/from USB drives, remote Backup and Restore to another My Cloud EX4, backup internal volumes and do cloud backups with Amazon S3 and Elephant Drive. You can of course back up things manually and it of course has integrated Apple Time Machine support.

If you get a WD My Cloud EX4 it comes in RAID 5 mode, but you can change that to RAID 0, 1, 5, 5+Hot-Spare or 10 by visiting the storage tab and changing the raid mode. You can also check the disk status adjust the iSCSI settings and other drive related things in this menu. Small Office/Home Office users looking for iSCSI, volume encryption, virtual folders (DFS) and active directories will be happy to know that the My Cloud EX4 supports them all. It should be noted that the stripe size (called chunk size by WD for some odd reason) is set to 48Kbytes by default and there is no way to change that value when configuring a new RAID setup.

When it comes to applications we were happy to see that WD supports a good number of them. For starters there are built in downloader Apps for Torrent, FTP and HTTP needs as well as a web file viewer. The WD My Cloud EX4 also supports a number of third party Apps like:

aMule – peer to peer download application

Transmission – peer to peer download application

IceCast – Internet music streamer

WordPress – blogging tool

Joomla – Content Management System

phBB – Internet Forum package

phpMyAdmin – MySQL admin tool

SqueezeCenter – Logitech media Server for Logitech hardware products

NZBGet – binary newsgrabber for nzb files

The last tab is the settings menu, which appears to be the dump area for a number of things as there is a sub menu with general and network settings, ISO mounting details, media, utilities, notifications and firmware updates (auto and manual updates are available). You might have noticed that there is no option to turn off the My Cloud EX4 yet. For this you either have to hold down the power button on the unit itself or go into the settings tab and then under the general menu you can scroll down to the device management settings and find the options to reboot or shutdown. WD plans on adding options to shutdown the unit on the home menu of the WD My Cloud EX4 software in the future to make this easier to find and access.